This invention relates to an improvement in fruit and vegetable juice extractors of the type wherein the fruit and vegetables or the like are grated or ground and centrifugalized for separation of the juice from the pulp or solid part.
One of such juice extractor is described in the specification of the U.S. Pat. No. 2,343,327, which discloses:
A fruit and vegetable juice extractor comprising, a rotary food basket mounted on a substantially vertical axis of rotation and having an annular concentric perforated side wall and a bottom wall and adapted to receive ground food such as fruits and vegetables and the like adjacent the bottom thereof, means to deliver food to be ground to said bottom wall, means for rotating said basket about its axis at a high velocity of several thousand revolutions per minute to effect a centrifugal movement of the ground food outwardly against the lower part of said wall, the lower part of said wall being formed with a shoulder to receive and break up the ground food centrifugally thrown thereagainst, the remainder of said wall sloping upwardly and outwardly from said shoulder to facilitate the upward travel of the ground food thereover in a relatively thin layer, and juice collector means surrounding said wall and adapted to receive the juice centrifugally expelled through said wall.
In such conventional juice extractor, the food, grated by the cutting teeth on the inner bottom face of the inverted frustro-conical rotatable basket, slides on the inner bottom face by the centrifugal force radially to the low vertical shoulder part of the filter net and then upwardly on the frustro-conical filter part. Since the height of the vertical shoulder part is very low, the ground mixture of the juice and the pulp are driven smoothly and quickly towards the frustro-conical filter part. Therefore, the mixture of the juice and pulp travels too fast toward the peripheral part of the basket, and hence a considerable amount of the juice flows together with pulp away from the upper periphery of the basket, not being effectively extracted of the juice. Furthermore, since the pulp of the food travels fast toward the upper peripheral end part of the basket, the pulp is prematurely discharged from the basket into a pulp sump space, thereby wasting a nourishing part of the food, unutilized. In such conventional juice extractor, only a relatively small percentage of the food, for example, 70% of apple, has been utilized, and 20 to 40% of the nourishment of the food has been wasted.